#I LOVE AMERICAN FOOD I LOVE AMERICAN FOOD CULTURE

[eosofspades]

i am a nationalist about exactly ONE (1) thing and it's that i fucking love american food. i LOVE american beverage. i love "large" drink being a whole bucket's worth i love milkshake with the thickness of concrete i LOVE going out to a diner and taking my next three meals home with me i love leftovers. i love burger and fries i love fried chicken i love pb&j i love macaroni and cheese i love traditional pancake and scrambled egg breakfast i love apple pie i LOVE ice cream sundae. enough complaining about deep fried carnival food american food is DELICIOUS and im not taking complaints anymore

[panchulien]

your post about gün really makes me want to write an accurate cod characters in the middle-east thing i cant lie. I see it so often in fics and people get certain parts of the region so wrong but i always hold myself back thinking no one would care but your post has me thinking maybe i should say fuck it and write it anyway.

turkish culture and arabic cultures have a lot in common of course so your post sparked that idea again :O

also having been to a few, we had a turkish neighbour growing up before we moved, i just know it'd be niks perfect afternoon. That warm feeling of all the food and company, the excitement around you, the mundane stories and complaining about the dumbest things as if its the most important thing happening. Also the food is truly amazing and nik would be so excited to introduce them to his own dishes, he'd have a great time for sure

thanks for sharing its such a sweet thought and i love when people share their culture!!

Aww Q this is such a sweet ask thank you so much. 🥺😭💖 I'm glad my post sparked that interest in you, and definitely don't hold yourself back if you want to explore more with your fics! I'm sure there are many people willing to help if you ever wanted to consult someone about the accuracies. (me included <3) Just the fact that you're concerned about it shows that you care, some writers just ball it when it comes to other cultures haha

You understood the picture I was trying to paint perfectly!! I just know cultural exchanges with Nik would be such a delight. He's seen a lot, always open to learn more about the world as he travels. He'd be such good company and I love him for that. Perfect contrast to the life he leads, these little exchanges with the locals, being accepted by them and allowing himself the calmness of it for a brief moment.

What I wouldn't give to just sit down and have a conversation with this man over some tea haha

[watchthekittycatcher]

I, a Latina, was eating miso soup. I looked across the mostly-empty cafeteria, and I saw an Asian girl eating tacos. I was so pleased. It was so striking to me. The scenario felt so inherently American. I like living in the United States. I like how we all decided to share the best parts of our heritage with each other.

[evergreen-endo]

my selfship with takiishi literally would not work without endo and the reasoning is chika’s burger obsession

[cator99]

I always get detained at da border because PROFUNC never ended but basically I'm like if a targeted individual didn't even care

[br1ghtestlight]

i think having breakfast at dennys would fix me but unfortunately like the only dennys in my town was shut down recently due to asbestos violations so i dont think thats gonna happen </3

[pupkou]

can we come together as a community and be honest with ourselves .. because i’m tired of seeing everything turned into an egg roll. not everything needs to be an egg roll

[lebada]

every time i research smth i consider to be a specifically american food (chicken nuggets, cool whip, american cheese) its origins lie in industry & theyre 'inventions' more than they are... foods. which is kinda crazy & so symbolic of what the US is in my head like all of them r innovations which make the foods resist better at diff temperatures so they can be sold in larger quantities

[starthelostboys]

tlb characters’ favorite meals:

michael: scrambled eggs with bacon and hash browns. michael is definitely a breakfast food fan, and this is his favorite breakfast meal. he prefers to make it himself, so he can cook the bacon the way he likes or put hot sauce on the eggs, but if he’s ever at a breakfast restaurant he’ll always order this there.

star: broccoli and cheddar soup. i don’t think star had a good relationship with her parents at all (in fact i hc that she ran away from home at 18) but her dad used to make this for her on special occasions and she’s never been able to find something that replaces it as her favorite food. every once and a while she’ll feel horribly homesick and get some of the campbell’s canned broccoli and cheddar soup.

david: tuna salad sandwich. he eats this like twice a month and when he does it’s the gross sandwiches that come in vending machines or the refrigerated shelf at gas stations. he truly and genuinely thinks it’s the best and most satisfying meal in the world will usually eat it alongside a can of diet coke.

dwayne: a reuben with salt and vinegar chips. he’s very picky when it comes to this specific thing. the bread on the sandwich can’t be toasted and the potato chips have to be kettle cooked or he isn’t satisfied. he hasn’t eaten this in years because there’s no restaurants in santa carla or the surrounding area that meet his high standards.

marko: bbq burger. specifically the one at a restaurant just outside of santa carla that closed down in the mid 1970s. he mourns the lose every day and has never found a bbq burger that hits quite the same.

paul: lasagna. his all time favorite is the one at this italian place in the town where he grew up, but he’s happy with any and all types of lasgna, including the shitty frozen meal ones.

laddie: spaghettios with hot dogs cut up in it. most of what he eats is fast food or from whatever quick service restaurants are on the boardwalk, so it’s not like he gets a lot of home cooked meals and he sees this as a sometimes treat that star or one of the boys will make for him every once in a while.

sam: grilled chicken tacos. he takes his tacos with cilantro and sour cream only, and as little spice as possible because he can’t handle it at all. he hasn’t eaten this at all since moving to santa carla cause his favorite version of it is at a mexican restaurant that the emersons used to go to semi regularly when they lived in arizona. if he ate any different chicken tacos it would just make him a little homesick and sad he can’t have the ones he likes.

edgar: blueberry pancakes with a side of onion rings. edgar seems like a diner food kind of guy to me (i haven’t forgotten the scene in the thirst where he and zoe get pancakes together), and he’s definitely a creature of habit so this is what he always orders. he refuses to put any sort of syrup on the pancakes and never gets any breakfast sides to go with them, it’s only ever onion rings.

alan: peanut butter and banana sandwich. i think that he and edgar were kind of left to their own devices a lot growing up (and it’s only gotten worse now that they’re teenagers), so they had to make their own meals and peanut butter and banana sandwiches are something they’d eat multiple times a week when they were kids. no matter how often he eats them he never gets tired of them.

lucy: chicken and dumplings. she makes this at least once a month, and every time michael or sam have ever gotten sick she makes it for them. she still uses her mom’s recipe from when she was a kid.

[communistmeme]

I hate you LinkedIn I hate you "work-life balance" I hate you girlboss culture I hate you productivity I hate you 40 hour work week I hate you "how to prevent burnout" classes I hate you I hate you I hate you

[angelsdean]

me looking at that scene from darkside of the moon where dean's sitting at the table and mary's cutting the crusts off his pb&j and seeing "breakfast" jsddfkd there's MILK on the table PLUS a sweet meal that consists of bread and spreads only. breakfast food<3

[neige-leblanche]

in truth, ive been interested in tea since i was eleven years old; i was a bit of a rascal at that age and my chinese teacher decided i was too advanced for whatever the rest of the class was doing so i spent my middle school chinese classes watching educational tv, reading storybooks, and browsing the classroom library, and one of the things i read was a bilingual magazine on chinese tea culture where it said things as specific as how fast you should pour the tea and how full you should pour the cups; ever since then ive been a snob fan; my interest also picked up last year when i had a summer job up the street from a chinese grocery store that had tons of different dried tea ingredients which is when i started making my own blends :D it's a bit of a fatal attraction since my caffeine tolerance is abysmal and black & oolong are my fave types, but i've been fiddling around with herbal & medicinal tea a bit too and one day i'll for sure like. put in an effort to raise my caffeine tolerance without becoming addicted orz

[nicoisgray]

holy shit, i'm studying in St Louis right now and i swear to god i saw this dude at Target wearing his Tarasenko jersey

IM SCREAMING

[lilhawkeye3]

A Crash Course to Kendrick's Super Bowl Performance, from a Black Woman

Note: this does NOT go in depth into all of the song's lyrics. I don't have time to recount two decades of his discography. This is just a summary of the performance itself.

Let's start with the first visual we get:

UNCLE SAM - most notably recognized from WWII American wartime propaganda, Uncle Sam is the personification of American patriotism and freedom. The term "uncle" is also evocative of Uncle Tom from Uncle Tom's Cabin, an abolitionist book that aided in inciting the Civil War. Uncle is also a very common term (both endearment and derogatory) towards Black men (eg. "unc"). Samuel L Jackson was fantastic. (Edit: and please look up his history of civil rights activism, he was on the FBI watchlist and even a pallbearer at MLKJr’s funeral.)

Uncle Sam also resembles a circus ringleader, notable for my next point:

THE GREAT AMERICAN GAME - no, not Super Bowl. The GAG is us the people being pitted against each other: through late-stage capitalism, through the culture war, through class warfare, through being built of the backs of slaves. We are all players in the GAG because none of us on this site were the oligarchs seated at the inauguration.

This is also seen as Kendrick's stage was a Play Station controller. Not only did it remind of circus rings visually, but it was a game battle stage. The Great American Game is a battle royale of the commoners for the amusement of the rich whites.

Remember the foods / Them color was tin and brown / But now they 100 and blue - For this I'll just say, look what the last election said about lowering the price of eggs... and look at the prices now.

The revolution about to be televised / You picked the right time / But the wrong guy - Election 2024 once more. *Edit to add, the first part of this lyric is in reference to the Black Liberation Song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron. Thanks to everyone who mentioned that.

THE FLAG DANCERS - yes, the dancers formed the US flag... off of the backs of Black people. Not a single white person in sight, and that's true of the cotton pickers in the fields. Plantations are part of how the US came to economic prominence after being a "backwater" colony. Remember tobacco? Cotton? Our bloodlines do. *Edit to add: they also all piled out of a clown car. The US flag in a clown car? Brilliant.

The red and blue dancers are also notable for representing the Crips and Bloods, two infamous street gangs. The dance in Not Like Us is the Crip Walk. I recommend researching more on your own time about them, but just know they are a large part of the stereotype of Black people being "ghetto."

TOO LOUD, TOO RECKLESS, TOO GHETTO. Do you really know how to play the game? - This is exactly what Black people, especially Black men, get told all the time. It's why we change our names on resumes if they sound "too Black." It's why we codeswitch in non-Black company. This is especially rich considering how non-Black people love our culture and love to make money off of us, as the latter part of the quote points to. And it's even more profound during the Super Bowl-- the NFL is majority Black players.

STREET LIGHT A CAPELLA -- "thug" stereotype dancers to counteract the a capella connotations, with Uncle Sam then saying that Kendrick figured out "bringing other street guys around being a culture cheat code." Yes, this is a direct hit at Drake (listen to "Not Like Us") but also politically. Look up "model minority". Notably I would point to Candace Owens, or the Miami Venezuelan political group that's been in the news recently, especially as this directly led to Kendrick being surrounded by...

DANCERS IN WHITE -- it's white America. That's... that's the allegory.

NOT LIKE US TEASER -- Kendrick says "Not Like Us" is "their favorite song." -> he means white people specifically here. It comes after he's surrounded by all white dancers, the women around him who are his call and response are also in white (my opinion, they represent the industry). He's saying "Not Like Us" is the favorite of yts because it is about BLACK MEN FIGHTING. This again is reflected in the video game stage and ringleader Uncle Sam.

SZA -- instead of giving what they want, we see SZA. She's one of Drake's exes and Kendrick has always supported her.

ALL THE STARS -- This was in the first Black Panther movie, which I recommend you watch. Rest in Power Chadwick. Notably, this movie was incredibly mainstream as a major Marvel movie, and then we have Uncle Sam say...

"THAT'S WHAT AMERICA WANTS: NICE AND CALM. DON'T MESS THIS UP" -- translation: Marvel (the industry, America, etc.) wanted a safe, semi-pop song because white American likes safe pop songs, not Kendrick's usual heavy rap style about his life as a Black man! Don't mess up what you've got going mainstream for having this "Black rap feud" with Drake, who is an R&B model minority to white people because he's safe.

So what does Kendrick say?

IT'S A CULTURAL DIVIDE / IMMA GET IT ON THE FLOOR -- He was warned not to be political or apologetically Black for this Super Bowl performance, but he is using this big stage opportunity to speak out.

40 ACRES AND A MULE / THIS IS BIGGER THAN THE MUSIC -- 40 acres and a mule are what the freed slaves were promised. Instead, this land went to white sharecroppers. Research Jim Crow laws.

THEY TRIED TO RIG THE GAME / BUT YOU CAN'T FAKE INFLUENCE -- rig the election, rig the industry like with model minority Drake, rig the Great American Game with culture war to distract from active class warfare.

NOT LIKE US -- the only thing I'll mention because it made me holler is Serena Williams crip walking on Drake's metaphorical grave. She's another one of his exes (read: Drake harassed the hell out of her). *Edit: she was also fined at the 2012 Olympics for crip walking in celebration at Wimbledon.

TURN THE TV OFF -- exactly like he said! The TV is a distraction, the Super Bowl is a distraction, the mainstream news is often a distraction. Turn it off and get with your people!

GAME OVER — could not see this on my stream but at the end of the performance, the lights in the stadium spelled this out. The world is watching, America…

In conclusion, Kendrick Lamar is a visionary and thank you for coming to my TED Talk.